Abstract:

The state-of-the art in autonomous vehicles requires planning and estimation techniques that capture the continuous-time aspects of the problem.  For example, discretely sampling a trajectory to ensure collision avoidance at those samples does not necessarily guarantee that the trajectory is safe.  Some of our recent work uses B-splines to represent the continuous trajectory, where safety at every point on the trajectory can be guaranteed by checking the convex hull of the control points.  In this talk we will give a tutorial overview of the B-spline parameterization for trajectories of dynamic systems.  We will overview applications of these techniques to planning problems for autonomous vehicles with an emphasis on unmanned aircraft systems.  We will also describe recent results in applying B-spline techniques to estimation problem where measurement delays, and out-of-sequence measurements, and clock mismatch issues are handled in a natural way.

Bio: 

Randal W. Beard received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City in 1991, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1993, the M.S. degree in mathematics in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1995, all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Since 1996, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, where he is currently the Steven White University Professor, and the department chair. His primary research focus is autonomous control of small air vehicles and multivehicle coordination and control. He is a past associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems.  He is a fellow of IEEE and AIAA.